Design Musings

Simplicity is Key

I have literally just slowed down enough to come back to my blog. Everything has been pretty manic between a trip to Brazil to see my family and discovering that I got a full time job! I am all packed and ready to move down to Dorset now. While attempting to find all my belongings and wasting time on the net, I came across 3 Red Dot Award Winners that made me smile. I have always been a strong believer that simplicity is key and that sometimes redesigning existing products into a simpler, more user friendly creation is often harder than a blue sky solution and, most importantly, actually more useful.

Let’s start with the Recreation category. If you’ve ever played tennis, you may have mastered the fancy flick to retrieve tennis balls from the floor and may smother a laugh at the less skilful or older lot bending over to pick up each ball while their backs are slowly getting more sore. Kim Seonghyun and Yu Yunko’s ‘Tennis Picker’ have created the answer for us tennis-bender-overs. You simply stick, what seems like, a velcro strip onto your racket and then you simply brush the ball and it should, theoretically, stick to it. No bending over, no back ache. How effective these strips are in the long run or if they damage the balls at all, I must admit, I’m pretty clueless, but it is a neat simple solution to an issue that people don’t admit.

Once you’ve tried out the ‘Tennis Picker’ you’ll be wanting a shower so let’s move on over to the Personal Hygiene category. Chen Wanting has created the ‘Tiya Convenient Floor Drain’. For those who know the hassle of removing long hair from a shower drain, you’ll greatly appreciate this little design. The removable piece is like a comb and so it is much easier to remove tangled hair. Have a look.

Lastly, the Green category always has something innovative up its sleeve, but who could’ve thought that he winner would create such a basic idea? We all tend to collect plastic bags nowadays and recycle them as bin bags, however, all of our shopping bags vary in size and some simply just do not fit our bins! So why not use Hu Lingling and Zhang Baoyi’s Eco Trash Can. Just slot your bin bag into the slit it fits in and use it without the fear of food falling into the actual container! For those of you that are avid recyclers, you could even use smaller bin bags and separate the container into different recycling elements! The possibilities are endless!

I do think that sometimes we push ourselves to think of crazy innovative solutions for menial problems when actually the best ideas tend to be the simplest. Every now and then we should step back and look at what we already have, think for a moment, and see if we can improve the products around us rather than adding fancy, complicated and technological ‘equipment’ to our lives.